Texas president Gossage among last of dying breed

FORT WORTH, Texas -- It feels like walking into some kind of motorsports Oval Office. The entrance is flanked by U.S. and Texas flags. Nearly one whole wall is taken up by old racing helmets, headgear once used by drivers from A.J. Foyt to Bobby Allison to Alan Kulwicki, all of them arranged in alternating black and white shadowboxes and placed on clear pedestals to appear as if suspended in midair. There's one of Richard Petty's old cowboy hats, guitars signed by Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones, and behind the big desk a picture window offering a panoramic view of Texas Motor Speedway.

The infamous 'Step-Mom' billboard to which Eddie Gossage can only say, "I couldn't help myself."

This is where Eddie Gossage operates. Actually, he doesn't operate at all. He lobbies, he cajoles, he seethes, he massages, he negotiates. The president and general manager of the 1.5-mile Texas track is one of the few genuine old-school promoters remaining in what's fast becoming a stiff-upper-lip business, the kind of guy whose first telephone call will be to the media when high winds blow down a scoring tower, or will stoke a feud between drivers to such an extent that even a sanctioning body will shift uncomfortably. Mike Helton, president of NASCAR, called him this week. Helton rarely calls Gossage, particularly in the days preceding a Sprint Cup event.

The reason? "Preemptive strike," Helton told him, likely only half joking.

Texas is something of a different place, a part of the world where cattle graze obliviously beside gridlocked Interstate highways, where high school football reaches almost religious proportions, where nobody blinks at the sight of someone wearing a cowboy hat in a nice restaurant. Gossage, raised in Nashville, Tenn., but seemingly born to be here, fits right in. Everything is indeed bigger in Texas, from the size of the porterhouse served at Cattlemen's to the seating capacity of the new Dallas Cowboys stadium to the desire for publicity bubbling from that memento-lined office overlooking the speedway. Just this week, he called one of the local papers, raising a fuss. It's race week, after all. So what was a story on the head coach of the Miami Heat -- Miami, for goodness' sake -- doing as the centerpiece on the front page? (Continued)